Scarlett and Gabriel were both armed with AR-15s, while Yuri carried a battered, chipped, but well-oiled Mosin-Nagant without a scope. The man with the spectacles appeared to be unarmed.
“Where’s my 1911?” Victor asked.
Gabriel’s condescending smile wrinkled the freckles on his face. “Gone. Someone probably traded it for rations by now.”
“No they didn’t,” Scarlett said, sighing. She reached into her coat pocket and withdrew Victor’s Colt 1911. “I held onto it for you.” She dangled it in the air between them, tense, still unwilling to look Victor squarely in the eye.
Watching her, seeing the tentativeness that she seemed to reserve for Gabriel’s presence, Victor recalled what he had said to her back at the hideout:
I’ll protect you.
And she had answered: Are you sure you can keep that promise, Victor?
But he couldn’t keep that promise, not if she wouldn’t let him. He was still undecided whether, when the opportunity came for him and Dante to escape (and he was sure the opportunity would come, even if he had to force it to happen), he would extend the opportunity to Scarlett as well. He was too weary to hold onto his grievances for long. If he had known with confidence where she stood, he would have looked for an opportunity to talk privately with her and explain what he intended to do.
But right now his best guess was that she stood with Gabriel, and there was no way Gabriel was getting an invitation.
He took the pistol and slipped it into his coat. The steel was already warm—warm with the heat of Scarlett’s body. She had kept it for him, waiting for this opportunity to give it back to him. It did not undo her betrayal, but it was a step in the right direction.
Yuri had watched the exchange. Now he caught Victor’s attention and said flatly, “If you aim that weapon at one of us, I will shoot your brother through the eye.” Without waiting for Victor to respond, he turned and stalked along the street as the lazy snowflakes fell around them, blanketing the ground in a fine layer of dust.
___
The soldiers at the checkpoint, a series of cars parked bumper-to-bumper with barbed wire strung across the top, recognized Yuri and waved them through. They stood together in a small circle in their parkas and fur hats, holding steaming styrofoam cups in their hands, and it was not until Victor saw them that he noticed, really noticed, how drastically the weather had changed. Just a week earlier he had watched Scarlett and Gabriel dance on a warm evening that felt reminiscent of summer, and now the sky was steely gray and the snow was accumulating and he could not take a breath without recognizing winter’s frosty reign. It was the wrong time for traveling, not just because of the darkness, and the cold only underscored something he already sensed: that he and everyone else in his group were expendable to Yates’s cause.
Victor knew very little about the purpose of their journey. The only information Yates had deemed necessary for him to know was that he was there to help protect the others, and he was supposed to treat everything Yuri said as law. It seemed strange to him that Yates had changed his mind about the brothers so quickly. Then again, Victor did not know what Dante and Yates had talked about. Dante had said they’d talked about Victor’s experience in the military, and how useful he could be to Yates’s cause. Victor, however, couldn’t escape the feeling that he wasn’t being told the whole story.
Yuri was determined to move as silently as possible, and he seemed to relish every opportunity to tell the others to shut up. The six travelers fell into an uneven line: Yuri at the front by himself (occasionally flicking on his flashlight to help him navigate), then the small man with the backpack, then the Gervasio brothers, and finally the “two lovebirds” as Yuri called them. Victor had tried to slink back to the end of the group with Dante, but Yuri would not allow it. They were too much of a flight risk.
Victor watched the mousy man in front of him take rapid, shuffling steps. The backpack was weighted heavily on one side, so it swung like a pendulum as he walked. The man stared hard at the ground most of the time, as if he just knew there was a crevasse up ahead somewhere in the darkness, and only rarely did he raise his head to consider his surroundings.
Dante dubbed him, in a low whisper so Yuri would not bark at them, “the Lemming.”
The Lemming was not the only one carrying a backpack. The “Lovebirds” each carried a backpack as well. Victor suspected the reason he was not also carrying a backpack was that Yuri didn’t want him to have any supplies should he try sneaking away. In this cold, with neither food nor water and only the clothes on his body for warmth, splitting off from the group would be almost certain death. If he wanted to make a run for it with Dante, they would have to get their hands on at least one of those backpacks.
They traveled for about four hours, picking their way through a silent, ruined cityscape. Only now did Victor realize just how much Yates had done to make the Commune livable. From what he could see in the poor light, it appeared that the remains of the city to the north were no better than what he had encountered to the south and west. Victor had been through war-zones in better shape than this city. It was as if full-scale looting had gone on for months, amplified by fires, gas-line explosions, and unchecked flooding. Most of the city seemed completely untenable.
Finally, Yuri led them to the gutted, cave-like remains of a concrete structure. It might have been a parking garage in a previous life, but now it was as hollow as the shell of a dead beetle.
“Gabriel,” Yuri said, “go clear the building.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the most expendable person here. Your girlfriend’s expendable, too, but she has a prettier face.”
Gabriel seemed to understand it was pointless to argue. He raised his gun and slipped into the darkness of the building.
Despite the cold, Yuri’s face showed a sheen of sweat. He kept wiping at it and blowing drops off the end of his nose. Victor checked his armpits and discovered he was sweating too, though not as prodigiously, and he began to long for a good hot fire, since that moisture would soon work against him. Their chances of finding anything to burn in a place like this, however, were not very good.
“All clear,” Gabriel said sulkily as he returned from the darkness. He appeared visibly agitated by his little adventure. Scarlett rubbed his arm reassuringly.
Inside the building, Yuri clicked on a small flashlight and swept it quickly around the room, exposing a line of wheelchair buses sagging on flat tires. Victor’s heart sank. This was where Yuri meant to spend what remained of the night?
“Hey, wait a minute, guys,” Dante said. “I know where we are.” He paused for effect and flashed an ironic smile. “We’re in hell.”
“Why here?” Victor asked. It seemed the obvious question.
“Because I know this place,” Yuri answered. He strode toward the only intact corner in the room. Drawn like moths to the flashlight, the others followed. Yuri flipped aside a wooden pallet and uncovered a bundle of sticks, a milk jug full of water, and three knitted blankets.
The floor close to this hidden cache was stained black, and now Victor understood why. Maybe they would have fire, after all, though they would have to burn the pallet to keep the fire burning for more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
“Get the cups,” Yuri said to Gabriel. He spread the bundle of sticks beside the blackened spot on the floor, then started laying them across one another like a log cabin. He left a small opening at the side of the structure. Afterward, he cut wood shavings and piled them at the opening to act as tinder.
“How’s the ankle?” Victor asked his brother as they absently watched Gabriel unzip Scarlett’s backpack and withdraw a set of tin cups.
“Better,” Dante answered. Most of the swelling had gone down during their stay at the Commune, though Victor worried that traveling might aggravate it again. He worried because he might need Dante to run.
The Lemming shuffled over to the corner, where he lowered his backpack to the floor and t
hen slid down along the wall. He was almost invisible in the darkness.
“What do you make of our little friend?” Victor asked, speaking low enough that only Dante could hear.
Dante frowned in thought. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why do you think he’s here? He’s not a soldier, so clearly he’s here for another reason. Maybe he’s the reason we’re all here.”
Dante shrugged as if it did not matter much to him one way or the other.
They watched as Yuri struck a match and lit the wood shavings. The sticks must have been drying for a long time, because the greedy flames quickly spread. Scarlett was pouring water from the jug into the cups Gabriel was holding.
“That wood won’t last long,” Victor said to Yuri. “Let me go look for more.”
“No.” Yuri took a deep breath and blew into the little fire, not even pausing to meet Victor’s eyes.
“Alright.” Victor stepped over to the pallet, and before anyone could say a word he drove his boot down on one the boards with a splintering crack. As he wrenched the nailed ends of the wood free, he sensed Yuri’s large form looming beside him.
“Don’t you fucking do that again,” Yuri said.
Victor looked at the darkness surrounding their concrete hideout, visible through a glassless transom window. “Whatever’s out there, it might harm us. But if we don’t stay warm tonight, the cold will definitely kill us.”
Yuri leaned close enough for Victor to smell his sour sweat. The large man’s face was hidden in shadow. “Don’t. Do that. Again.” That was all he said before returning to his fire.
___
The wind was a hungry creature hissing, whistling, and gusting against the concrete structure. Stray snowflakes slipped inside and swirled along an invisible eddy.
Scarlett had placed chunks of Ramen noodles in each of the cups, and now the six travelers hunkered in the corner of the gutted building and sipped hot soup, saying nothing, watching the small fire reduce itself to cinders. For a short time they could see each other’s faces. Yuri had backed himself directly into the corner so he could see the whole room, and the Lemming sat huddled in a blanket only a few feet away on his left. To Yuri’s right, Scarlett and Gabriel shared the second blanket, and further along the Gervasio brothers shared the third one. Only Yuri was left out, but he did not seem to mind.
The fire flared, flickered, and then the last of the sticks tumbled inward and there was nothing but a shimmering bed of embers left to torture them with phantom heat. This is going to be a long night, Dante thought, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Victor beneath a blanket that smelled of gasoline, his stomach warm - for the moment - with a hot meal. He did not know how he or anyone else could manage to sleep with only cold, heat-sapping concrete for a bed, never mind having a blanket that was just barely long enough to stretch across the shoulders of both him and Victor, but he intended to try.
Victor’s breathing was deep and steady. Dante wondered how long the two of them could go on like this, lying again, wearing false faces. Why did it seem so necessary to protect himself from the only person in the world who cared about his wellbeing? For a long time, as the silence took wing, he rehearsed how he would confess everything to Victor, just as he had confessed searching for drugs in that pharmacy beneath Scarlett’s hideout. But the words would not come. They were in there, sure, rolling around on his tongue, but when he opened his mouth nothing escaped except an empty breath of air, a puff of condensation that dissipated as soon as it appeared.
Was it possible the only reason they mattered to each other was that they were born to the same parents? If they had not been raised in the same house, would Victor despise him? And would Dante in turn hate Victor for despising him?
Sometime during the darkness, when Dante was confident Victor was asleep, he slid the blanket off his body and crept away from the corner of the room. Nobody tried to stop him. The clouds had broken as secretively as they had come together, and now a yellow moon rode just above the broken skyscrapers. The city could not have looked more haunted.
“Can’t sleep?” a voice asked from behind. Scarlett rubbed her shoulders as she joined him at the window. Her face seemed to glow in the moonlight.
“It’s peaceful out here,” Dante answered. “I was expecting to hear more gunshots, like when you were leading us to the Commune.”
She winced. “Some parts of the city are dead, like a frostbitten finger. I’m sure other parts of the world are like this, too. With the right people in position, this crisis would have been nothing more than a speed bump. But not everybody wants order.”
It reminded Dante of a line from The Dark Knight: “some men just want to watch the world burn.”
“He cares about you, you know,” he said. “I mean he wants to, if you’d just give him the chance.”
Scarlett did not answer, and Dante did not look at her. The silence was like a spear thrust into Dante’s heart, reminding him just how lonely he was and how much he wanted it all to end. It was not death he wanted, but simplicity: waking in the same place every morning, knowing what work he would be doing for the day, planning his future instead of feeling like he was constantly rolling the dice.
“I used to be scared of a boring life,” he said softly. “That was why I traveled around the world. I thought somewhere along the way I would find that missing piece, something that would give my life meaning. I would listen to friends my age who talked about nothing except how much they made at work and the houses they were going to buy and how hot their girlfriends were, and I’d think, Is that it? Is that what everything comes down to?
“I tried every kind of adventure I could find. I swam with sharks and nearly fell to my death solo climbing a cliff. But for what? To have a few snapshots to show my kids some day? To get a few scars, a few stories to tell over drinks, a few clever pick-up lines?”
“What is it you really want?” Scarlett asked, watching him now. She was shivering, but she did not fight it.
“That’s the million dollar question.”
“This may sound insensitive, but you’re not the only one who feels like you’re missing something, Dante. I feel that way, too. All of us do, at least when we’re vulnerable.”
Dante frowned, not liking this idea. It sounded too much like a line he had been hearing all his life: It is what it is, so get on with your life.
“I’m not sure people can be happy,” Scarlett continued. “Not as a continuous state, anyway. It’s something we glimpse now and then. We reach for it and it’s gone, and all we’re left with is the memory of how it felt, for that brief time, to get what we wanted. And most of the time we don’t even know what we want. We lie to ourselves, try to cheat our heart’s desire, but it never works out. The only thing we can do is to be grateful for those flashes of meaning and hold tight through the rest.”
“Love.”
“What?”
“That’s what we all really want,” Dante said. “We want love.”
Her shoulder brushed his, and then her lips were on his cheek. It was a gentle, chaste kiss that did not linger. She pulled away, but her face remained close to his.
“You’re a good man, Dante,” she said. “If there’s any justice in the world, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Just give it time.”
Dante stared into her eyes, feeling like something in his chest was ready to break, and needed to break. Like his heart had been encased in glass and if he could just find the courage to break through it, he would be free. He would be himself.
Scarlett’s fingers brushed his shoulder. “Try to get some sleep,” she said as she slipped past him, leaving him to the lonely moon and the broken skyscrapers, the gaping windows, a twilight world trapped in an unbreakable slumber. He stayed there a while longer. Then, when his heart would finally leave him alone, he returned to his sleeping brother and forgot the world for a little while.
Chapter 52
They were on their feet again a few hours later.
<
br /> The eastern sky was brushed with pale pink, the snow around the six travelers a chilly blue. It was only thick enough to blanket the street, and by midday it would be gone, but in the stillness of the morning it gave Dante an odd feeling, as if they had just stepped into a different world.
They had returned to the previous day’s marching pattern, the two brothers trailing the Lemming while Scarlett and Gabriel took the rear. The brothers were silent. It was an uneasy silence, at least to Dante, and now and then he felt Victor’s questioning gaze on him. He’d had opportunities to pull Victor aside and explain everything, but each time he had hesitated. Ever since reaching the Commune, he’d found himself treating Victor as if he were a crate of old dynamite that could go off at any moment. He worried how Victor would act if he knew what was really going on, not least of all because he doubted he would be able to restrain Victor. Victor would take his own path, as he always did, regardless of what Dante thought.
They were picking their way along a street made narrow by the rubble of the collapsed buildings on either side. Patches of gloaming sky showed through gaps in the buildings, giving Dante the sense that they were walking through a miniature model of a city, like toys wandering through a child’s bedroom.
The Shadow Walker (The Last Colony Book 2) Page 34